Luiza Guimarães is a UK-trained junior doctor who is now working as an ITU trainee in Australia.

She started her medical career with absolute certainty that she was going to become a CAMHS consultant and she devoted herself to the specialty throughout medical school. She even wrangled a foundation training job that had the rare combination of two psychiatric posts.

However, halfway through her foundation training, she had an unexpected change of heart after discovering a new love for acute medicine. She once jokingly told me that her two psychiatry rotations had made her unemployable for any other specialty but with her passion and brilliance she secured an F3 role as a teaching fellow while she worked towards a partially funded post-graduate certification in medical education.

Luiza subsequently moved out to Australia where she took an ITU job and loved it so much that she decided not to return to the multitude of training and fellowship jobs she had waiting for her in the UK. She is now on a 7-year ITU training contract in Australia.

In this episode, Luiza shares how she weighed the pros and cons of a training post in Australia over one in the UK, and how she overcame the challenges involved in building a life for herself somewhere entirely new.